Rails-like ActiveRecord in Aptana Jaxer to come

Mon, 07/28/2008 - 10:49 — John Riche

We can read some interesting things about the future of Aptana Jaxer in a blog post from Paul Colton (CEO of Aptana) announcing the hiring of Ajax gurus Greg Murray and Ryan Johnson. Apart from the fact that the Jaxer 1.0 release candidate will be available in a matter of days, we also learn that Jaxer will support "ActiveRecord-like JavaScript ORM for Jaxer that promises to make working with JavaScript data a pleasure".

Jaxer is a server side technology which is defined by its creator as "the world's first true Ajax server". The Jaxer home page indicates that "HTML, JavaScript, and CSS are native to Jaxer, as are XMLHttpRequests, JSON, DOM scripting, etc. And as a server it offers access to databases, files, and networking, as well as logging, process management, scalability, security, integration APIs, and extensibility".

Prior to Jaxer, Aptana picked up the development of the Radrails IDE which later got included in the Aptana Studio suite. The eclipse-based IDE provides an easy way to create and debug Ruby on Rails applications, as the whole Ruby on Rails commands and documentation are encapsulated in fancy looking windows and other visual helpers.

This comes to no surprise that, with the extensive Ruby on Rails knowledge the Aptana team acquired while building Radrails, Jaxer might get some of the nicest features from the framework.

Whether Rails will ever be "eclipsed" by the Jaxer technology remains to be seen but its future certainly looks interesting. Let's see how Aptana will transpose those rails-inspired niceties to Javascript and how well it will be promoted first...